I was still there when Rogerson slowed down, seeing my car, and pulled in. His headlights moved across the swing and slide and monkey bars to finally find me, staying there like a spotlight. He didn't get out of the car, but just left the engine idling as he waited. I squinted as I stood up, pulling my jacket around me. Like always, I didn't know what to expect from him. I slid a handful of that sand into my pocket, wondering what relics it had once held. I rubbed the grains between my fingers, like charms, then took a deep breath and stepped into that bright, bright light.

Chapter 11

I didn't tell my mother that I'd been kicked off the squad, exactly. In fact, she was so busy winning Cass backphone call by phone callshe didn't even question my flimsy explanation about how in the lull between winter and spring sports there were fewer practices. So I began spending more time in the darkroom at the Arts Center when she thought I was doing cheerleader stuff: sticking to my former schedule and going there after school, then showing up at the same time for dinner. On game nights, I'd just call Rina from wherever I was with Rogerson to find out who'd won before I went home. This was surprisingly easy. My mother was distracted not only with Cass but also with her annual April Fool's party, my father with a new semester, a chancellor search and the men and women's basketball teams in the thick of March Madness. Now it almost seemed that I was becoming invisible, passing through the house in my long sleeves and jeanseven as the weather heated up my eyes red regardless of Visine, hardly talking except to answer their standard queries: How was school? Who won the game? Would you please pass the potatoes? And the answers came easy, automatically. Fine. We did. Yes. The only time I ever felt safe anymore was when I was at the darkroom, in the half-​light with the door locked, everything quiet as I worked developing my pictures, watching each of the images come into being right before my eyes. Since Christmas I'd focused mostly on portraits of people. I was fascinated with the way light and angle could completely change the way a person looked, and I'd spent the last two months taking pictures of everyone I knew, trying to capture each one of their different faces.

Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there, and everything else fell away. I'd shot Corinna sitting on her front steps in the sunlight with the dog, Mingus, lying beside her. She was wearing a long, gauzy skirt and a big wool sweater fraying at the cuffs. She'd cocked her head to the side and propped one hand under her chin, her bracelets glinting in the sunshine, the TV in the distance behind her showing static. Her hair was blowing around her face and she was smiling, with Mingus looking up at her adoringly. I'd had the picture framed and gave it to her as a gift. She'd hung it on the wall in the living room, next to a huge Ansel Adams print of a canyon. She said she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a picture of herself that she liked, and sometimes when we were sitting on the couch just hanging out I'd catch her looking at it, studying her own face as it smiled back at her. I posed Boo sitting in the grass of her backyard, cross-​legged, right beside her chipped cement Buddha, both of them smiling and content. And I found my mother, her chair pulled up close to the TV, leaning forward to scan the screen during Lamont Whipper, looking for Cass. She'd been so absorbed she hadn't even heard me take the picture, her face hopeful, intent, watching carefully so as not to miss a single thing. That picture I buried deep under my sweaters in a drawer: it just hurt me, somehow, to look at it. Rogerson didn't have much patience for getting his picture taken, but occasionally I caught him: bending over the engine of the BMW with the hood up, reaching with one hand to brush back his hair. Standing in Corinna's kitchen drinking a Yoo Hoo with that big velvet Elvis taking up the whole frame behind him.

Lying on his bed right next to me, the lens just inches from his face, smiling slightly, sleepily, as I clicked the shutter. These were pictures I rushed to develop, holding my breath as they emerged before me. I'd examined them so closely, as if they were proof, absolute documentation that he wasn't a monster, that he was still the guy I'd fallen in love with. I'd bring them home and stick them in my dream journal, as if him smiling here or looking at me nicely there would balance out the truths I'd written to Cass in those same pages. I kept collecting faces, as if by holding all these people in my hands I could convince myself that everything was still okay. So I had Dave, rubbing his eyes with hair askew, half a frozen burrito in one hand. Rina in her cat's-​eye sunglasses and cheerleading uniform, smoking a cigarette and sticking out her tongue. My father in his chair, watching a basketball game, his face so expectant as the seconds ticked down and his team took a last-​chance, do-​or-​die shot. And Rogerson, again and again, smiling, not smiling, scowling, laughing, glaring. The only expression I didn't have of his was the one I knew by heart: the dark eyes, angry face, flushed skinthe last thing I usually saw before squeezing my eyes shut and bearing down. My favorite picture, though, was one I hadn't even taken. Roger-​son and I had been at Corinna's, sitting at their kitchen table, when she'd picked up my camera and leaned in close to us, telling us to say cheese. The day before, Rogerson had gotten upset with me for some reasonit was easier, sometimes, to just forget the specificsand punched me in the arm, which meant in the picture I was in my safe zone, when he was trying to make up with me. In the picture I'm on his lap as he sits at the table, my head against his chest. He has one arm around my waist, and just as Corinna hit the shutter he'd tickled me, making me burst out laughing, and he had, too. It is one of those great moments, the kind you can't plan. Sometimes the light or the expression is just perfect, and you're lucky enough to catch it, usually accidentally. I spent a lot of time looking at that picture. Wondering what I'd think of that girl, if I was someone else, seeing how easily she sits in her boyfriend's lap, laughing, with his arms around her. I would have thought her life was perfect, the way I once thought Cass's was. It was too easy, I was learning, to just assume things. One day I took all my pictures and hung them around my room, tacking them to the walls, the mirror, even the ceiling. Then I stood and stared at each of the faces, studying them one at a time. I learned them carefully, aware of every nuance in their expressions. They stared back at me, frozen, but even though I could read their entire world in their faces, none of them were looking that closely at me.